title: How to help patients (and analysts) bear the unbearable.
abstract: Psychoanalytic techniques are explored through which analysts can help patients tolerate, face, and attempt to resolve affects and conflicts that have seemed unbearable to the patient. The patient's feeling of "I can't" is differentiated from the feeling of "I won't." Process material focuses on patients' shifts between seeming inability to function as analytic collaborators and more responsible ownership and exploration of conflict. Analysts' either/or attitudes toward analyzability tend to interfere with flexible shifting between times when they can interpret and prolonged periods when they cannot interpret and the patient cannot collaborate. During the latter, the analyst needs to provide some noninterpretive function, such as holding, containing, or affirming, both for the patient and for him/herself.
authors.affiliation: Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, USA.
authors.forename: S J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Coen
mesh_terms: D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011572:Psychoanalysis; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D014167:Transference, Psychology